Does it violate free will if the person was never given the desire to do something in the first place?

Great Debates
401

This framing assumes something that hasn’t been demonstrated: that suffering is a variable God could simply “dial down” without fundamentally altering the structure of conscious life. Suffering is not optional add‑on, like background noise that could be reduced without consequence. This assumption is far from obvious.

People often imagine a world with “just a bit less” suffering, but the history of human psychology suggests that whatever the baseline is, we recalibrate. If physical pain, loss, or frustration were reduced to a fraction of what they are now, people would still experience the remaining discomfort as intolerable. Even trivial inconveniences, like boredom, social friction, unmet expectations, can escalate into deep psychological distress. So the idea that God could shave off some suffering while keeping everything else intact ignores how relative our experience of hardship is. Lower the floor, and we simply fall to the new floor.

I think the “optimum suffering” question is misguided. It treats suffering as a detachable quantity rather than a structural feature of beings who have desires, limitations, and the capacity to care about anything at all. You can imagine a world with no suffering, but imagination alone doesn’t show that such a world is metaphysically possible. I can imagine something coming from absolute nothingness, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s coherent. Mental conceivability is not a reliable guide to metaphysical possibility.

Also, I’m not so sure about those thinking agents that don’t seem to suffer. First, we don’t know whether they truly lack suffering or whether they simply lack the expressive channels we associate with it. Second, even if we could build a non‑suffering agent, that doesn’t show that a world of human‑like consciousness could exist without suffering. A thermostat doesn’t suffer either, but that tells us nothing about the requirements of a mind capable of valuing, choosing, loving, or experiencing joy.

I too believe that there is too much suffering in the world but I don’t think this feeling in itself can be used as an argument against the idea of a perfect deity (accused of inflicting gratuitous suffering).

402

I reject this definition of free will. To me, free will runs deeper than the ability to act according to one’s desires without coercion. In fact, you gesture toward this deeper level when you use the word desire itself.

I would argue that free will begins one step earlier: with the choice of emotional posture, the condition of the heart from which desires and actions arise. Thus desires are not merely given; they are entered into. From the emotional stance we choose, a range of actions (or inactions) then becomes possible.

For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, you may choose anger, fear, forgiveness, or even compassion. Each emotional choice opens a different set of possible actions. The act matters, but the prior choice of the heart is where freedom is most clearly exercised.

This is also where free will appears most theological, particularly from a biblical perspective. Scripture consistently says that God judges the heart, not merely external behavior. And Scripture goes further: “God is love” (Greek: Theos agapē estin). God is not simply loving as an action, but loving as essence, agapē, self giving love.

As an aside, this does not deny that actions have moral consequences. They clearly do. But biblically, the moral weight of actions flows from the underlying condition of the heart. That is where free will is most meaningfully exercised.

From this angle, humanity’s ability to operate outside of agapē may exist so that we can come to know, by experience rather than programming, that only one way truly works. That inner knowing is important for what God is doing. This period of discovery is what ultimately defines us as children of God: not by design alone, but by a free will choice of agapē (often described as surrender).

Once that choice is fully made, it is no longer possible not to live from it, because God is agapē. In that sense, we pass beyond innocence, not by ignorance, but by freely chosen alignment.

So, to respond directly to your question:

“Couldn’t the issue of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, and humanity being flooded, have been easily prevented if God simply didn’t make humans with those desires in the first place?”

Yes, but that was not what God was making.

God was (and is) making children who are worthy to be called children of God, not by constraint or design alone, but by the child’s own free will act, freely choosing agapē.

403

It’s not an assumption, I even phrased it as a question: Do you think that this world is optimal in terms of suffering? That it’s ideal?

I don’t claim to know. But it really, really doesn’t look like it. Suffering appears pretty random and unfairly distributed; it very much looks like the product of unfeeling natural laws.

Humans ourselves have done much to decrease unnecessary suffering so it looks like a God would have had a lot of scope to do the same.
Of course, some would argue that the “point” of such suffering is that humans figure out medicine or whatever…but then we’re clearly in unfalsifiable ad hoc reasoning territory.
Suffering that historically humans had no ability to ameliorate? Part of God’s plan. Suffering that we can now treat with things like painkillers? Part of God’s plan. Suffering that we can’t do much about yet? Part of God’s plan. Mysterious ways.

But we’re talking about optimal suffering as the least necessary suffering. And you are talking about things which you think make it necessary – so you’re not pushing back against the “misguided” description at all.
Unless you wish to claim that an omnibenevolent god permits unnecessary, i.e. gratuitous, suffering? Is that your position?

404

I am sorry, but I have the impression that we’re speaking past each other. I will refrain myself from participating in this debate.

405

No, and I have explicitly agreed that an omnipotent being does not have to do all possible things, just be able to do all possible things. I gave an example using the die. I realize your position would be more defensible if I did not accept this, but I do.
The question is what a being can do, not what it happens to do. The question is whether a being who is inherently omnibenevolent can be inherently omnipotent also. My position is that it cannot - one or the other capability must go. If you sacrifice omnibenevolence than omnipotence stays, and vice versa.

The free will defense fails for the case of natural evil, which has nothing to do with free will. I think it fails more generally (and remember, I accept there would be evil, just not that we have a minimal amount of evil) but I agree that it has nothing to do with the issue.
What has to do with the issue is whether omnibenevolence is a description of the actions of an entity, or an inherent characteristic of that entity.

406

What you are saying is that whatever the “range” of available pain and suffering is inherently available, the “scale” would just be reset so that the worst we could experience will always be 10.

Like the proverbial music speaker “dialed up to 11”, it’s nonsense. Doesn’t matter if the output of the speaker is 100 dB, or 120 dB, or 200 dB, the highest the knob goes is 10. The scale is applied to the range available.

But isn’t that an assumption, that whatever the worst could ever be must feel this bad? That somehow if there was a limit that the worst pain could ever feel was, say, stubbing your toe level not burning alive level, that somehow we would not be able to function as sensory and thinking beings?

407

I’m glad you do. So on this point, then, we’re in agreement: an omnipotent being can do only and exclusively good things, without that entailing any loss of their omnipotence. That is all the omnibenevolence that’s needed for my purposes: a being that is able to do anything that’s possible, and which in all their actions seeks to maximize the good. Why would one not be happy calling this omnibenevolent?

Yet you seem intent on having omnibenevolence entail some restriction on the actions performed by a being. I don’t get that at all. Why would that be a notion anybody would care about? The relevant point is that God, or some all-powerful being, seeks to maximize the good, which they can without having to be forced. Furthermore, I would rather think that being constrained to only act according to the maxim of goodness is rather antithetical to the idea of benevolence: no matter what their intentions are, such a being will always act towards the good, while a benevolent action is rather one in which you choose the good, because that’s what you value. The most rotten person on Earth could be implanted with a device that blows up their brain if they act against the good, but does that make them suddenly benevolent? No: it merely removes their ability to act according to their volition, and replaces it with coercion. Additionally, of course, one has to wonder how it could be that there is a notion of good, apparently external to God, that somehow constraints them. Where does it come from? How does it exert this power? This just seems to invite needless theological difficulties.

So I think a notion of omnibenevolence that emerges from choosing the good, while being able to also do the bad, is far more sensible. And if you somehow want to refrain from calling this ‘omnibenevolence’, what else would you call it? And what would be the difference between the Christian God in their tri-omnihood and one that merely chooses the good, as opposed to being railroaded into it?

You’ve pointed to God having to do certain things a certain way as support of this notion. But since we agree that God can only do what is possible, if there is only one possible way to achieve a particular end, then that’s the one God will take, but this isn’t constraining in the sense of denying them options, since there are no options. So God having to do certain things a certain way doesn’t entail any constraints on God of the sort you want omnibenevolence to exert.

So it seems to me that omnibenevolence in the sense of just choosing to do good does all that you would expect from the omnibenevolence of the Christian deity, without leading to any conflicts with omnipotence; while the constraining sort of omnibenevolence you favor seems to have as its sole quality that it does lead to such a conflict, while being otherwise both dodgy as an extrapolation of benevolence and wholly unnecessary to fulfil any theological function. So why would anybody care about such a notion?

We’ve been here before, and I think there’s nothing to be gained from going down that road again.

408

But it is. “Suffering” is a function of the brain that can be disabled without the person ceasing to exist. I recall in one of Oliver Sack’s books on neurology him talking about a case where someone with crippling pain underwent experimental brain surgery, with the result that the pain no longer hurt. He felt it just as strongly, but it wasn’t making him suffer anymore.

I think the common talk about suffering being somehow necessary, virtuous or innate to consciousness is a classic case of making a virtue out of a necessity.

409

It’s not just the idea of a deity, it’s the specific description that the deity is omnibenevolent. If you take away that stipulation and say that God is whimsical, or God is jealous, or God is disinterested, or God is malicious, then there is no incongruity with the amount of “necessary evil”.

This is your original statement on the raisin cookie example.

Clearly stated, perhaps because you … really likes them.

Your raisin cookie math is accurate, but your analogy is flawed because gran is not omnianti-raisin-cookie. She makes them because other people like them. Therefore, there is no built-in expectation that gran will make the minimum number of raisin cookies, whatever that means.

But god is supposed to be omnibenevolent. You have been arguing that means inheritly god desires to maximize moral good,
i.e. minimize moral evil.

We don’t know how many raisin cookies gran will make for other people. We do know that god desires the least amount of raisin cookies evil.

410

(Sorry for the clunky quoting, but I don’t want the context here to get lost.)

@Mijin claimed that my premise was that there is at least one raisin cookie, while as the quote you helpfully provide shows that it in fact is that she sometimes makes them. In the visualization I’ve been using to clarify the logic, this is the same as saying that the set ‘jars of cookies made by gran’ and the set ‘jars of cookies containing raisin cookies’ have some non-empty overlap, just the same way the sets ‘worlds in which God exists’ and ‘worlds in which evil exists’ do (as a result of the FWD).

Because of this overlap between the set of all jars containing raisin cookies and the set of all cookie jars containing gran’s cookies, this means that some of gran’s cookie jars contain raisin cookies (not that there is at least one raisin cookie per jar), this directly entails that on average, there is a certain fraction of raisin cookies present in gran’s cookie jars, which means that the expected amount of raisin cookies is greater than zero. This exactly parallels the case of the PoE: the FWD shows that at least some worlds in which God exists contain evil, thus the average amount of evil is greater than zero, thus the expected amount of evil in a world in which God exists is greater than zero.

And as noted, this exactly parallels the case of the PoE, since what it leads to is that at least some of gran’s cookie jars contain raisin cookies, just as at least some worlds in which a tri-omni God exists contain evil. The point is that while both God and gran would prefer things a certain way (free of evil or raisins, respectively) they aren’t necessarily able to act on this preference.

Both God and gran desire the least amount of their respective bugbears. Both God and gran can’t ensure this to be met in every single case. The analogy is exact: all that’s needed is the nonvanishing overlap between the respective sets.

411

The critical thing is that you used the word know, which makes it not analogous to the FWD whether you meant we know she made at least one raisin cookie, or we know that she sometimes makes raisin cookies.

To make it analogous, the only thing we would know is that grandma detests raisin cookies and would rather not bake a single one. And then there would only be the possibility of some other mitigating factor that might make her nonetheless make one or more raisin cookies.

And then yeah – we see that it is rational for us to doubt that a raisin cookie was made by grandma, the same as it is rational to doubt or have confidence in any empirical claim. The “possibility of additional factors” is always there for any claim, and in this case serves only to show we cannot know grandma didn’t make a raisin cookie, not that we have reason to doubt it.

(ETA: I think it’s also a misleading analogy in general, because of course people make things for other people that don’t match their own preferences. Whereas, with the PoE, the preference is about what happens to god’s creations – there’s no disinction between god’s own tastes for himself because he can’t even suffer. But even putting this aside, I don’t think the analogy shows what you want it to)

As usual I’ll read your longer response when I have more time.

412

We know it in the raisin cookie case in exactly the same sense as we do in the case of the PoE: namely, that the intersection of the respective sets is non-empty. This is something you have agreed with:

While I still disagree on the ‘trivial’, this is all that’s needed for the argumentation to work. The non-empty intersection means a non-zero average, which entails a non-zero expected value. Thus, only evil exceeding this expectation works as evidence against God, but without further arguments, we have no gauge as to how high the expectation should be, hence any evidential claim is dubious.

You can also approach this from the other side, if that helps: if the intersection were empty, then even the observation of a single instance of evil would conclusively prove that there is no God. Since you don’t claim this, you already agree that some evil is to be expected—which is all that’s needed for my argument.

(ETA: For some reason, perhaps because of the quoting, this got posted as a response to myself rather than @Mijin.)

413

That’s right; suffering=>evolution=>diversity. In a universe with evolution, suffering is necessary. I would note that evolution as an active process is not a necessary requirement of a universe with diversity; indeed, an omniscient god could simulate the evolution of species just by imagining it.

This was the thesis devised by Phillip Henry Gosse, who suggested that God created all the species in the world, and all the fossils in the rocks, one day about six thousand years ago. All that diversity in the fossil record, and in today’s biosphere, was designed by God in an instant using His omniscience. This sort of last-thursdayism could create a universe just as complex and wonderful as the one we perceive, but using virtual (fake) evolution rather than Survival of the Fittest. A kind of No Man’s Sky universe.

Indeed, an omnimaxgod could create an entire universe without any present or future discomfort, but with a fake history full of remembered suffering so that its inhabitants have something to compare it to.

414

Gran is always able to act on her own preference. If she chooses not to, that is her choice.

But you say God is constrained by necessary suffering. He is limited from acting to remove all evil.

415

I’ve been asking what type of omnibenevolence you subscribe to. If it is descriptive omnibenevolence - God has always does things that maximize good, but does not have to, then I agree there is no logical problem with that and omnipotence, since it is logically possible for God to choose to do something “evil.” However that position relies either on an unwarranted supposition, or evidence, and the evidence for it is lacking, to put it mildly. If you defend god’s omnibenevolence by saying apparently evil things are actually good, you would be using circular reasoning, since that position depends on the assumption that god is omnibenevolent. Appealing to an evil being does not work, since an omnipotent god allows the evil being to operate. God did not directly kill Job’s wife and children, but he certainly allowed it and would be morally culpable.
If omnibenevolence was prescriptive, that is, an inherent part of God’s nature (which I think is the standard Christian view) then you have the contradiction I’ve been mentioning. You don’t have the problem of apparent evil happening, since given the assumption of omnibenevolence you can claim that anything God does which is apparently evil is actually good in the long run, and our finite knowledge does not let us see that. Not really defensible, but possible.
If you use this definition, then a Yes or No answer - can God in his omnipotence do something that does not maximize good while staying omnibenevolent. Yes or no - please do not mention choice.

416

No, your exact words were: “you knew that she sometimes makes them”
Now you’re rowing back to the claim that we merely haven’t ruled out the possibility that she might make a raisin cookie, which is what the set being non-empty would mean.

But fine, let’s just go with this second description.

The problem with the second description is that a possibility not being ruled out is almost-always the case for any claim. I can’t absolutely rule out not only that magic pixies live in my house, but that I, in fact, am a magic pixie.

This is why this kind of statement is meaningless in terms of probability. We can’t even say there’s a non-zero probability of me being a pixie because the total number of claims is infinite, so we need a reason to believe p > 0. That doesn’t come for free.

What does affect probability is observation, like of raisin cookies, or meat on Bob’s plate, or cats on your lap. Or suffering in the world.

417

Both gran and God juggle their respective constraints. God wants to minimize evil and maximize moral value, gran wants to minimize raisins and maximize the happiness of her favorite grandchild.

But seriously, why would you think this has any relevance? The only thing that matters is that there’s a non-zero number of cases with raisins, respectively evil. The motivations behind that are pretty much beside the point.

Great, that’s all I’ve been saying. There’s no logical issue with being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

Evidence doesn’t enter into it. I’m neither saying that there actually is any omnibenevolent being, much less an omnipotent one, nor is there any requirement to discover by evidential means whether a being is actually omnibenevolent. (How after all would you do that if a being were constrained to do good? The problem is the same.) The point is simply that it’s possible to be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent; evidence doesn’t enter into that.

I’m not rowing back anything. In both cases, the overlap between the two sets means that there are some cases where the amount of evil, respectively raisins, is non-zero, and in both cases, we’re perfectly aware of that fact, hence in both cases, we know to expect a nonvanishing amount of evil or raisin cookies.

Exactly. And precisely how it affects our probability judgments is determined by our prior knowledge. Hence the need for further information.

418

Yes. The “Problem of Evil” only exists because of the three “omnis” of the tri-omni god. Remove any of them and it goes away. Because then “God doesn’t know” “God can’t do that” or “God doesn’t care” become valid answers. That’s why so many attempts to justify evil and suffering under a tri-omni god amount to weakening one or all of those qualities while pretending not to.

Or the universe of Terry Pratchett’s Strata, where it’s discovered that the universe is only thousands of years old and its billions of years of history including remnants of ancient civilizations is all faked.

419

There’s a big difference between knowing there is some possible universe where grandma makes a raisin cookie and knowing that grandma makes at least one cookie in this universe. It’s the difference between knowing there’s a possible universe where a golden teapot orbits one of the planets and knowing that one in fact sometimes does in our universe.

“We know grandma sometimes makes raisin cookies” was an attempt to sneak the conclusion in.

The first sentence yes, obviously. The second no.
In all the examples presented we gain or lose confidence in claims on the basis of empirical evidence. More information is of course always welcome but it doesn’t mean we have no reason, which was your claim that kicked off this tangent. We have reason to gain or lose confidence in all these cases, and the possibility of a hypothetical universe where we are wrong is equally irrelevant in all of them.

420

No. Again, both cases are exactly equivalent: a set of possible worlds in which God exists, (at least) some of which contain evil; a set of possible gran’s cookie jars, (at least) some of which contain raisins.

Not unless you have extra information. If you have the information that gran’s cookie jars contain 10% raisin cookies on average, then a raisin cookie lowers the probability you assign to a given jar being gran’s; if you have the information that her cookie jars contain 60% raisin cookies on average, then a raisin cookie increases it. If you have only the information that at least some of gran’s jars contain (some unknown amount of) raisin cookies, as you do both here and in the PoE, you can’t distinguish between these cases, and hence, don’t know whether a raisin cookie increases or decreases the assigned likelihood.

Out of curiosity, why do you think that actual formulations of the evidential PoE (reference to which you seem to have dropped rather suddenly) refer explicitly to premises claiming the existence of gratuitous evil, i.e. evil in excess of what one would expect a tri-omni God to permit, in order to make their case? After all, according to you, every observation of evil gives us reason to doubt, so that would be completely superfluous. And why are these premises bolstered with further argumentation, as in e.g. the Bambi and Sue-cases?

The answer is of course that these supply exactly the extra information I’ve been pointing out is needed: a reason to believe that the observed evil exceeds what is compatible with a tri-omni God. But if your argumentation were right, none of that would be necessary.